I don’t quite agree with this (and please remember that I am allergic to bee stings).
I read all the way through that Snopes article and gleaned this much:
There was research that showed that just-add-water cake mixes were emotionally unsatisfying to some number of women who had at least tried them.
Experience also showed that cakes with fresh eggs were objectively better than cakes with dried eggs already in the mix.
Cake mixes did change to require fresh eggs. It seems entirely possible that both of these previous facts had influence on this change.
The above-noted research also changed the way manufacturers marketed cake mixes and the cake baking process in other ways.
So there was some truth to Amateur Barbarian’s summary of events, even if it is not perfectly accurate. In any case, it was only an illustration of a type of marketing behavior, and was not offered as proof or even argument.
Except, of course, if you actually read the story and note that not all of the brands took out the artificial eggs, and that one of the brands that didn’t became one of the top two brands.
I have to agree that the ‘natural’ and ‘organic’ claims tend to be so much hog-wash, in many cases. The appeal is, as you point out, to “notions of not being cold, soulless, mechanical” and so forth.
I do think that the Starbucks ad campaign that Am.Barb. brought to our attention is about something else, though. Starbucks has always been about “aspirational” fantasies about being An Important Person Who Thinks Nothing Of Paying $7 For A Cup of Coffee…fantasies of being a one-percenter, in other words.
And what characterizes One-Percenters?.. among other things, that they get waited on by “less-valuable” people. That barista who is striving to please you is a tribute to your own importance.
The Starbucks site ballyhooing the “Small-Batch Cold Brew Coffee” says:
I want to know why 20 hours in particular is the magic number? Seems like by varying the grind and the amount of water, etc… you could probably do it in 24 hours, which seems to me, like a much more logistically reasonable time frame. You put it in for your shift at 8 am, and get it out the following morning at 8.
Unless it’ some kind of beginning/end shift thing, where a shift puts the cold-brew in at the end of a 4 hour shift, and retrieves it at the beginning of the same shift the following day. So the morning shift puts theirs in at 9 am as they leave, and it’s done at 4 am the following day. The next shift puts it in at 1 pm, and retrieves it at 9 am as they show up, and so on and so forth.
In the same vein as what–as marketers reformulating cake mixes to require fresh eggs, as a result of research showing that requiring fresh eggs would lead to customers having a greater emotional investment in the end product?
That makes total sense. People nitpicking you on the details are being annoying and should stop.
The details are very interesting, mind you–I love nerdy food history stuff. But impugning your integrity because your analogy, while fundamentally sound, overstated some details about the analogized case, is obnoxious and unnecessary.
"The key marketing innovation that Dichter’s analysis spurred was not the fresh-egg cake mix, but rather the repositioning of cakes as merely one element of a larger product, an overall creation that entailed a much greater degree of participation and creativity from homemakers and emphasized appearance over taste:
“Dichter rightly perceived the overwhelming weight of the moral and emotional imperative to bake cakes from scratch. His research spurred countless ads and magazine articles aimed at persuading women to differentiate between the plain cake layers — “merely step number one,” according to Living — and the finished masterpiece. “Now, success in cakemaking is packaged right along with the precision ingredients,” Myrna Johnston assured readers of Better Homes & Gardens in 1953. “You can put your effort into glorifying your cake with frosting, dreaming up an exciting trim that puts your own label on it.” For modern women, these authorities proclaimed, the real art of baking began after the cake emerged from the oven.’”
If Starbucks were advertising their cold-brew as the annoying Step 1 we’ve already done for you, then I’d consider it comparable. I’d say what Starbucks is doing is closer to “genuine corinthian leather” territory.
It wasn’t a result of such research. It was a guess. It turned out that cake mixes with a fresh egg made a better cake.
AB stated that cake mixes were something of a flop until then. That is wrong. He also stated that the fresh egg recipe didn’t make much difference in the end product. That was also wrong.
You’re a teacher. I hope you don’t teach your students that being wrong on the details is irrelevant.
…and I’d purely guessed at the current price of their base-product.
But, seriously. What they’ve made massive profits from is the human propensity to want to feel Special and Important ('of course I deserve this pricey cup of coffee!–I work hard and I’m a member of the elite, and this proves it…’ etc. etc.)
I realize that it’s basically obligatory to include a dig at Apple in any thread that mentions marketing, but when exactly did Apple “[turn] up the little corner cafe with an owner that really, really cares about you channel”?
The psychologist said that maybe making the housewife add an egg would make her feel better about making a mix. He didn’t showmit to be true. The Snopes article then goes on to note that the two leading brands was one with dried eggs and the other requiring the addition of a fresh one. So if the egg adding made anyone feel better it didn’t translate into sales.
It is, however, less cringe-inducing than the old commercial advertising some fast-food company’s “scratch-made” biscuits, which to me sounded as if the baker had a dermatological condition. Yeech.
Yes, “not false in the specifics” in much the same way that the claim “I spent the afternoon ballooning over the Serengeti with the Dalai Lama” is also not false except in the specifics.
I would assume that the bit about handmade cold brewed is to make it clear that it is made fresh in house. As opposed to made in some factory, packaged and shipped.
I hope you saw some elephants. The Dalai Lama seems a pretty cool old guy, and I expect the sight of a bunch of African elephants with the balloon’s shadow drifting silently over them would move him to a deep philosophical insight.
…and I’d purely guessed at the current price of their base-product.